Natural user-input (NUI) technologies aim to provide intuitive modes of interaction between computer systems and human beings. Such modes may include posture, gesture, gaze, and/or speech recognition, as examples. Increasingly, a suitably configured vision and/or listening system may replace or augment traditional user-interface hardware, such as a keyboard, mouse, touch screen, gamepad, or joystick controller.
In video gaming, for example, a vision system may be configured to observe and recognize the postures and/or gestures of a player, and thereby control the in-game actions of that player. It is typically not the case, however, for a common set of gestures to be recognized across different applications, including the operating-system shell of the computer system. As a consequence, a user may be burdened with having to learn and perform numerous, application-specific variants of common gestures and to use them in the appropriate context. Failure to do so may result in a frustrating user experience, as variation in a recognized gesture from one application to the next may yield unexpected results during program execution.